Democrats Line Up to Praise Dingy Harry’s Utter Failure on Filibustering Judges

Apr 27, 2005

RUSH: This morning on the Senate floor, a bunch of Democrats stood up, basically to praise Dingy Harry for failing to get the Republicans to not drop the nuclear bomb. Now, I know that sounds odd, but as you listen to this, it sounds to me exactly like what they’re doing. We have the mom in tennis shoes, Patty Murray from Washington, we have Dingy Harry himself, and we have the most partisan man in Washington, Senator Patrick Leahy, also one of the biggest hypocrites in Washington. You hear this and you’ll see what I mean. They’re lining up to praise Dingy Harry for failing to not get the Republicans to drop the nuclear bomb. Here first, Patty Murray.PATTY MURRAY: Mr. President, there’s even news this morning that our friends on the other side are unwilling to come to the table to compromise to avoid this crisis. I want to take a second to praise our leader, Senator Reid for his efforts to find a reasonable conclusion before the nuclear bomb is dropped.RUSH: Okay, so I guess now we know the plan. Broder gets the word to write the column — we went through the whole cycle of how this happens yesterday. Broder gets the word to write the column, he writes the column on Sunday offering a compromise, Biden talks about it on the Sunday shows, Judy Woodruff of CNN talks to Dingy Harry and they act like this is something that just spontaneously combusted, when in fact it was a well-articulated stratagem, and then the press falls in line executing their role, playing their role in this. So I guess what we’re to take from this is that the compromise was not serious, but it was a compromise, and so this is big. I mean, we are big people, we Democrats, we are willing to get along, we’re Rodney Kings. We are willing to get along. We offered a compromise, and, look, those Republicans, those SOB Republicans, they turned it down. Well, I think we need to thank our leader Dingy Harry because he showed he’s a big man.

The compromise was worthless by the way, and later in the day moved up to three, “We’ll give you three of the judges, of the seven, but you don’t use the nuclear option.” And Frist said, “No, we’re not compromising on anything less than get all of these nominees a vote on the Senate floor. That’s what the Constitution indicates, that’s what the Senate tradition has always been, that these people get a vote on the Senate floor and your compromise doesn’t accomplish that.” Here’s Dingy Harry himself. REID: My plaintive plea to every one of my 99 friends in the Senate, let’s work something out. Let’s try to get along. Let’s see a picture, that Bill Frist and Harry Reid can walk out here, not representing these special interest groups, but representing the American people and trying to keep this body as it is and has been for over 200 years and walk out here together and say, “We’ve resolved our differences. We’re going to move forward with the business of this country.” That’s my desire.RUSH: It is not. Let’s just be blunt. None of that is anything he wants to happen. If that happens, you know, he’s going to have to start wearing body armor because the MoveOn.org crowd is going to have him in the crosshairs. The wacko fringe is not going to put up with Dingy Harry compromising with the Republicans on anything. It ain’t going to happen, folks. And Dingy Harry doesn’t want that himself. This little pleading for compromise, “Can’t we all just get along,” wasn’t offered very forcefully. I guess he was trying to be emotive, trying to be, shall we say, serious about this. But, you know, and the special interest groups aren’t going to let Dingy Harry get away with things they don’t authorize, either, People for the American Way, the Ralph Neas bunch, not going to go along. It’s precisely because of the Democrats that we are now conducting Senate business in a way other than it has always been conducted for the past 200 years. Here finally Senator Depends, Patrick Leahy.SENATOR DEPENDS: Senator Reid yesterday gave — the Democratic leader gave a very strong speech. I came on the floor and said I totally agreed with him, saying that there are ways to compromise. That’s really the way the Senate has existed for well over 200 years. We’d be a lot better if we did it that way. I don’t think it benefits the country, it doesn’t benefit the president, and I would call upon the president, be a uniter, don’t be a divider.RUSH: Yeah, be a uniter, don’t be a divider. This is Senator Patrick Leahy who, as we mentioned to you on Monday of this week, actually said back in 1998 that he has no interest in denying members or nominees a vote, that everybody ought to have a vote on the floor of the Senate. He said this back in 1998. Now, he’s doing just the opposite. It’s the Democrats who are not compromising, it’s the Democrats changing the rules, it’s the Democrats who really don’t want to get along and it’s all because of what I told you yesterday, folks. They’re scared to death of who these nominees are. They’re people of faith, but in addition to that they’re also afraid that some of these nominees could eventually be tapped to be Supreme Court justices by the president. They don’t want to confirm them at the appellate court level and then have — or the Circuit Court level and then have to turn around and oppose them after having voted for them or confirmed them once before. And the other thing is that they’re deathly afraid, they know the court is their last refuge where they can institutionalize liberalism and conceal it, protect it from the arena of ideas, from the Democratic process. And that’s exactly what’s going on here. They want to institutionalize liberalism so that it can never be voted out, never be voted on, it just becomes part of the fabric of society because it’s been planted there by a bunch of activist judges. So they’ll accept a bunch of Republican moderates. If Bush sends up a bunch of Republican moderates, you know, will eventually be cowed by the New York Times and the Washington Post into voting with Democrats or voting with liberals so their reputations will be written about very favorably in those newspapers then fine, they’ll confirm those, but they’re not about to set up a Supreme Court farm team here, and they’re protecting the last vestige of hope they have to be able to inculcate this society with liberalism. Bob Dole today has an op-ed piece in the New York Times, and I have an excerpt of it here. “In the coming weeks we may witness a vote in the US Senate that will define the 109th Congress for the ages. It will focus on procedure, whether the Senate should amend its own rules to ensure that nominees to the federal bench can be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Amending the Senate rules over the objection of a substantial minority could be the option of last resort, but let’s be honest. By creating a new threshold for the confirmation of judicial nominees, the Democratic minority has abandoned the tradition of mutual self-restraint that has long allowed the Senate to function as an institution. This tradition has a bipartisan pedigree. When I was the Senate Republican leader President Clinton nominated two judges to the federal bench whose records were particularly troubling to me. Despite my misgivings, both received an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor and they were confirmed. To be fair, the Democrats have previously refrained from resorting to the filibustering even when confronted with controversial judicial nominees.

“That’s why the current obstruction effort by the Democrat leadership is so extraordinary. President Bush has the lowest appellate court confirmation rate of any modern president. Each of the ten filibuster victims has been rated qualified or well-qualified by the ABA. Each has the support of a majority in the Senate, which is all it used to take to get them confirmed. If Bill Frist is unable to persuade the Democrat leadership to end its obstruction he may move to change the Senate rules through majority vote. Senator Frist was right this past weekend when he observed that there’s nothing radical about a procedural technique that gives senators the opportunity to vote on a nominee. Although the Democrats don’t like to admit it, in the past they have voted to end delaying tactics. In fact, Senator Byrd was once a proponent of doing so. In the coming days I hope changing the Senate’s rules won’t be necessary, but Senator Frist will be fully justified in doing so if he believes he has exhausted every effort at compromise. Of course there is an easier solution to the impasse. Democrats can stop playing their obstruction game. Let President Bush’s judicial nominees receive what they’re entitled to, an up-or-down vote.” And they’re not going to do that, folks, because they know they’d lose the up-or-down vote. This really is about policy. I mean, some say it’s about process. It’s about policy. It’s about who these nominees are. They are people of faith. It is about the fact that they are originalists. They are not judges that will end up deciding things or inventing things or writing things the way the liberals want them written. And the liberals are losing the White House; they are losing the Congress; they are losing in statehouses; they’re losing in elections. If you look at a map of this country, the red states versus the blue states, the red counties versus the blue counties, it’s obvious they’re losing. The courts are the last place for them to hold on. And so that’s what they’re doing. Fine and dandy, let them try it. I just want everybody to be educated and informed properly on this because the way you overturn this is in the arena of ideas. The way you overturn this is informing people. Let ’em vote, and then you go out and implement, that’s the process. The American people in this country generally get what they want. Not all the time, I mean there are exceptions to it, and it’s that process the Democrats are scared to death of. The Democrats are afraid to death of the ballot box. They’re afraid of the Democratic process, because they don’t trust you. And they don’t trust you to do what they want, and they don’t trust themselves to be able to persuade you that they’re right, and so since they don’t trust you and they don’t trust the Democratic process, they want to use the iron fist of controlling the judiciary to get what they want outside the democratic process and that’s all this is about. BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: You know, let’s go back to 2000. The Democrats considered Bush an illegitimate president in 2000. They did everything possible to undermine him, from filibustering judges for the first time in history, to persuading Jim Jeffords to leave the GOP so they could take over the Senate. Then Bush was reelected. They remain a minority in Congress, and they are imploding. That’s what all of this means. They know how desperate it is for them. They are imploding. And let me suggest that if the Republicans don’t stop these filibusters against judges and stop it once and for all right now, then the Senate will be forever changed for the worse. This is not about maintaining some valued tradition of debate. This is about restoring tradition. It’s the Democrats that are turning things upside down. If the Republicans do change the rule, essentially the status quo pre-2000 for 200 years will prevail, will go back to being the way it always was. END TRANSCRIPT